Jack Eichel has the most precise and insane pre-game ritual ever

Sports Illustrated’s Alex Prewitt wrote a wonderful profile of Jack Eichel, the captain of the resurgent Buffalo Sabres. You should read it.

Wedged therein is a description of the meticulous and exhausting way Eichel approaches game day. Prewitt provided a full transcript of that discussion on Twitter, and it’s one of the most fascinating examples of athlete neuroticism that I’ve ever seen.

I think “Chuck a stick of gum in” is my favorite line here, but I honestly can’t tell. There’s so much going on.

One thing I know is: Jack Eichel showers more on game day than I have since my first child was born. In 2013.

Around 2 a.m. one of my older children runs into the bedroom proclaiming to need and/or be afraid of something. I deftly handle the issue and get back to sleep. At 2:17 a.m. I awake again with a foot in my mouth because when I said I deftly handled the issue I meant that I just let the kid go to sleep next to me and now they have rotated 191 degrees and starfished so that they are taking up as much room as possible and kicking me in the face. I think about the fact that we should cut their toenails before falling back to sleep.

Around 7 a.m. the other child rushes into the bedroom to snuggle. The snuggle lasts 13 seconds before becoming wrestling. If you’ve never been awakened by a 5-year-old tussling with a 3-year-old on your bladder then don’t tell anyone you’ve ever lived, OK? After hitting the bathroom I open up Twitter. Seconds later I hold my finger down on the Twitter icon so that it jiggles and consider deleting it but then remember I work in media and my ability to feed my children is directly tied to how connected to the world I am. I look at the kids. One has the other in a headlock and may or may not have urinated, I can’t tell. I come *this close* to deleting Twitter. If it’s the third Tuesday and the moon is in its waxing phase I shower. If not, I sigh audibly and consider changing out of my sweatpants but then pretend to not be able to find any clean grownup pants and shrug. I go visit the baby, who is 9 months old and not crawling and only ever smiling and the light of my life. I revel in her and she flashes her eyes in a way that can only mean she is thinking about how good she is going to be at wrestling her siblings in just a few months.

The middle child wants to be carried downstairs with the baby, so I hoist both up in my arms and navigate a minefield of 93 Legos on the way to the kitchen. Upon setting them down I cross “Get good workout in” off my to do list. I brew 13 cups of coffee in my 12-cup coffee maker and put bread and frozen waffles into the toaster while extracting various toppings — peanut butter, maple syrup, whatever is in the green jar, whipped cream — from their hiding spots. When the toaster emits its goods I cover them with stuff and put them on plates and the kids complain because they would complain even if I gave them butter covered in melted chocolate (or chocolate covered in melted butter) for breakfast. I pour my first cup of coffee, which is actually four cups.

Eventually my son wanders away and puts on a random assortment of clothing, then leaves the house. He must be in kindergarten, because somebody is teaching him math and writing. At that point I take the girls upstairs and scan the floor for potential choking hazards. As long as there are fewer than three I put the baby down and grab a bottle of detangling spray for the older one. She’ll only sit still if I put on Peppa Pig but I don’t want to play a full episode since they’re 10 minutes and we don’t have 10 minutes so I go to YouTube where people have made bootleg videos of Peppa Pig and avoided copyright violations, I guess, by cutting the episodes short so that they just end randomly. It must be so frustrating for the rapidly developing neurons in my daughter’s brain that no story ever has a real conclusion, Daddy Pig does something dumb with no recourse or Rebecca Rabbit gets lost and nobody finds her. I’m probably creating new strains of attention deficit disorder just by inflicting this upon my daughter but her hair looks good. I put a dress and some leggings on her and reflect on how modern and helpful I am as a husband and then my wife comes in and points out that the dress is actually a winter coat and it’s on backwards and that I put the leggings on the baby’s head. Sometimes I take my daughter to pre-school because, look, it’s really important to leave the house 2 or 3 times a week and other times I just sit with the baby, who mostly giggles at me and tries to choke herself with Legos.

Around 9:15 I commute to the basement, but not before stopping by the kitchen table to survey the remnants of breakfast. I chuck a half-eaten waffle coated with ranch (that green container held ranch) in and take the same beleaguered steps into the basement as I always do.

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